The social phenomena political economy and economics aspire to explain and predict have from the beginning of speculation about these subject presented two aspects. On the one hand it is clear from our daily experience that economic phenomena (prices, production, consumption, and so forth) arise from individual actions (going to the store and buying something, contracting for the construction of a building and the like). On the other hand, these individual actions always present themselves as aggregate, statistical phenomena (the market price, gross domestic product, etc.) A peculiarity of economics is that the very phenomena it studies take a quantitative form (market transactions, accounts) produced directly from the phenomena. The profit and loss of a company, or the net worth of a household, are quantities that are inherent in the existence of the company of the household. The economist may have to take some trouble to collect this data and organize it, but is not required, like the physicist or biologist, to devise instruments to represent the phenomenon studied (the behavior of the electron or the cell, for example) in a quantitative form.
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Foley, Duncan K. 2004. “The strange history of the Economic Agent.” New School Economic Review 1(1): 82-94
Posted 3 years ago at 20:14. Add a comment
Economics as a discipline, in teaching, research and policy, is very poor at ethics. There are six inter-related reasons for this. First, whilst the rigid distinction between positive and normative economics (and theory and fact) has long been recognized in principle to be invalid, the discipline has continued in practice as if nothing were wrong with the separation(s) between the two. Second, economics is negligent of, and backward in, methodology, and so unlikely to interrogate its own ethical or other foundations. Third, economics also neglects its own history as a discipline, and so its own shifting ethical approaches and content. Fourth, economics has been isolated from the other social sciences so that their contribution to ethical questions has been ignored. Fifth, mainstream economics has always been and is now almost absolutely intolerant of heterodox alternatives from which ethical differences might be teased out. Sixth, in sum, with method, methodology, history of economic thought, interdisciplinarity and heterodoxy sidelined to marginal status, this has all meant that economics is extraordinarily lacking in circumspection around the (ethical) meaning and implications of its standard concepts such as production, consumption, utility and the market, let alone development itself. It stumbles among these as if partially sighted, a lack of vision that is compounded in turning to development where the urge to prescribe is rarely matched by attention to context.
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Fine, Ben. 2004. “Economics and Ethics: Amartya Sen as Point of Departure.” New School Economic Review 1(1): 95-104
Posted 3 years ago at 20:19. Add a comment
